As the gaming industry continues to grow, the need for new leadership increases. Operators increasingly hire talented executives from other sectors, notably FanDuel CEO Amy Howe (Ticketmaster, Live Nation) and Entain CEO Jette Nygaard-Andersen, who was the CEO of Modern Times Group, a Swedish digital entertainment company.
Sportradar Chairman of the Board Jeff Yabuki comes from a finance background, having worked for companies including American Express, H&R Block, and for 15 years Fiserv.
During the SBC Summit North America at the Meadowlands Exposition Center in New Jersey, Yabuki stated he increased Fiserv’s sales from $4 billion to $13 billion and the company’s value from $7 billion to $100 billion. He accomplished those gains by “thinking about where the world was going and delivering technology ahead of a growing market, which is a lot what’s going on here (in the gaming industry).”
Yabuki told SBC VP Growth & Strategy Americas Sue Schneider, during the session “Staying Ahead of an Accelerating Industry: Insight from Chairman of Sportradar, Jeff Yabuki,” that the parallels between gaming and finance are the combinations of people, process, and technology.
But there’s one major difference: the maturity and solidity of banking and financial institutions versus the relative infancy of sports betting.
“We might be in the first inning, where banking is in the eighth inning,” Yabuki explained. “Here in this industry, there are many more opportunities to change the manner in which the activity is pursued. And not just the experiences around it, not just someday when all the legislation passes – and I’m sure much of it will occur here – but how you drive engagement, how you drive loyalty, how the economic model gets built, how technology can change the manner in which data can both be created and utilized, right today.”
Yabuki thinks gaming is one of few industries in the U.S. that’s in the “wild wild west, an industry that is plus or minus $9 billion today, but will be multiples of that, maybe three times that, when we exit the decade.”
He’s also excited about the growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning, which Yabuki thinks have “finally caught up to innovation.
“The question is only, how do we bring that practicality to bear?” he said. “I suspect in a decade, when I’m in a wheelchair, that this conference will be talking about how this quantum AI changed the way sports betting, sports gambling, is occurring. All of that is on the horizon and it’s exciting to be in the industry.”
Innovation, Yabuki thinks, is critical to the gaming-industry’s future. But he said there’s one caveat to that idea: innovation is not risk free.
“I never liked the idea of people saying you have to fail fast,” Yabuki said, “but I could never come up with a better way of saying it. So I agree. You have to fail fast. You have to try different things. But you have to articulate why it’s important to your core model. And you can’t be afraid to experiment with new technologies.”
